In a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, to reduce power consumption of a user equipment or to reduce radio resources used in the LTE network, the user equipment may release a radio connection link established between the user equipment and a network side after data service transmission is completed.
After the user equipment releases the radio connection link, if downlink data or downlink signaling to be sent to the user equipment exists in a wireless network, a network element, such as a mobility management entity (MME), in the wireless network needs to send a paging message to a base station in a tracking area (TA) in which the user equipment resides to find the user equipment, and transmit the downlink data or the downlink signaling to the user equipment.
However, as a quantity of paging messages increases, processing a large quantity of paging messages one by one leads to higher usage of a central processing unit (CPU) of the MME, and transmission of the large quantity of paging messages results in an increase in signaling load of an S1 interface between the MME and the base station.
In view of the foregoing problems, a Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) aggregate paging technology is proposed in the prior art. In the SCTP aggregate paging technology, a plurality of paging messages can be packaged into an SCTP data packet at an SCTP protocol layer, and the SCTP data packet is delivered to the base station. In this way, CPU usage of the MME due to processing the large quantity of paging messages one by one can be decreased, and the signaling load of the S1 interface can be reduced.
However, the following problem exists: An aggregation delay is caused during aggregate paging of a plurality of paging messages, affecting service experience of some user equipments with a relatively high priority.